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Most of our social nature is like that of other primates - we're mostly out for ourselves.

Jonathan Haidt

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Jonathan Haidt
Age: 60
Born: 1963
Born: October 19
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Jonathan David Haidt
Primates
Mostly
Social
Nature
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More quotes by Jonathan Haidt

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Religious experiences are real and common, whether or not God exists, and these experiences often make people whole and at peace.
Jonathan Haidt
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The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship
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Individuals who could not form cooperative alliances, on average, died sooner and left fewer children. And so we are the descendants of the successful cooperators.
Jonathan Haidt
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I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.
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Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.
Jonathan Haidt
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Love and work are crucial for human happiness because, when done well, they draw us out of ourselves and into connection with people and projects beyond ourselves. Happiness comes from getting these connections right.
Jonathan Haidt
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If you grow up in a WEIRD society, you become so well educated in the ethic of autonomy that you can detect oppression and inequality even where the apparent victims see nothing wrong.
Jonathan Haidt
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Human rationality depends critically on sophisticated emotionality. It is only because our emotional brain works so well that our reasoning can work at all.
Jonathan Haidt
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The word religion literally means, in Latin, to link or bind together and despite the vast variation in the world's religions, Wilson shows that religions always serve to coordinate and orient people's behavior toward each other and toward the group as a whole, sometimes for the purpose of competing with other groups.
Jonathan Haidt
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In college, I was dead set on being a philosophy major, because I wanted to figure out the meaning of life. Four years later I realized philosophy had really nothing to say about the meaning of life, and psychology and literature are really where it's at.
Jonathan Haidt
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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Jonathan Haidt
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I got interested in the American culture war back in 2004, and it's one of the only growth stocks I've ever invested in.
Jonathan Haidt
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Let me say it diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.
Jonathan Haidt
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If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated - everyone except for psychopaths.
Jonathan Haidt
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If you have a personality predisposed to liberalism, you might gravitate more to the artsy crowd or the anti-establishment crowd. And then those peers will affect you, and they will give you values, and you will copy them.
Jonathan Haidt
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The psychological origins of love are in attachment to parents and sexual partners. We do not attach to ourselves we do not seek security and fulfillment in ourselves.
Jonathan Haidt
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Happiness doesn't come from getting what you want. It doesn't come from within, either. Happiness comes from *between*--from finding the right relationship between yourself and others, between yourself and your work, and between yourself and something larger than yourself.
Jonathan Haidt
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Liberals and conservatives are opponents in the most literal sense, each using the myth of pure evil to demonize the other side and unite there own.
Jonathan Haidt
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Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.
Jonathan Haidt
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While it is useful to rebut charges and get your arguments out in circulation, you have to understand that arguments and evidence have little impact on people as long as their feelings tilt them against you.
Jonathan Haidt